The GolemMaker's End Game
by The Exile
Summary: When the Server goes down for maintenance, Argelmach's apprentice finds that he cannot sleep.
1. Chapter 1

--The Golem-Maker's End Game--

It took me all day to deactivate all the golems.

I didn't get to deactivate the golems very often. Argelmach preferred to keep them on standby when they weren't in use. It was important to be able to reactivate a golem quickly, he said, in case of an emergency, such as whenever adventurers invaded the factory. Today I was told to deactivate them all, make sure they were definitely deactivated and tether them to the wall just in case.

"They'll go berserk tomorrow if you don't." he explained.

"What, they have to sleep through tomorrow?" I asked, fascinated, "Just like people?"

"What makes you think my golems are any less of people than you, you useless moron?" replied Argelmach, whacking me across the knee with the apprentice-whacking spanner before dashing off back into his little workshop in the next room. When I was next able to stand up, I de-worded the last golem, fastened its chains and then scrambled up onto its head, grabbed a wooden beam and hauled myself up into the rafters, where I curled up and closed my eyes. I was planning to start my Maintenance hibernation early.

I was awoken by an almighty explosion, a lurching sensation then a sudden pain through my entire body when I landed on something hard. I rolled out of the way when I looked up and realised that the wooden beam that I slept on was about to fall on me. While I avoided the beam, I was struck on the head with rocky debris. The roof was caving in.

I ran out of the room and into Argelmach's workshop, screaming his name. He didn't respond. He had switched himself off. Sighing, I grabbed his legs and dragged him through the factory and out into the corridor. Shielding him from the blast, I waited for the rumbling and destruction to end. Fortunately, it seemed to be only the factory that was exploding and not the entire mountain. Adventurers, I thought, this has to be the work of those vicious barbarians. I checked my master for injuries. If his body was at all damaged, I would doubtless be blamed.

Then I happened to glance at his watch, precisely calibrated as usual, keeping time more exact than the brains of the dragons in the Caverns of Time themselves, and I froze.

Maintenance had already begun.

My immediate instinct was to collapse on the spot, curl up into a ball and try to sleep. It wasn't working. It was too late. I could already hear weird, unearthly noises, feel a sickly sensation of unease that made my heart beat too fast for me to sleep. I sat in a foetal position next to Argelmach's prone body and watched as the wall slowly darkened and twisted. Before my eyes, the whole chamber became a series of lines made of light, like scaffolding, and I could see through it into the whole mountain.

Then something started drifting through the wall. It was made of blindingly bright white light. As I watched in horror, it manifested into the shape of a winged being, neither man nor woman, dressed in a diaphanous shroud with cloth wrapped over its face. It was beautiful in the way an iMac was beautiul - cold, inhuman. I recognised it - I had seen pictures of it on church walls. It was a Spirit Guide. The being who guided the souls of the dead through the Spirit Realm. I was dead. We were all dead. Punished for being awake during Maintenance.

It pointed one slender finger at me and whispered a few words in a voice that was calm and neutral but somehow wrong. As though it wasn't quite talking in time to the rhythm of any clock but its own. My face went white. I leaned over and started the incantation to reactivate Argelmach, praying silently to Ragnaros that he wasn't password protected or something. A chill grip slowed my wrist.

That was when I descended into insanity.

First, my own body collapsed into wireframes, then even further into strings of letters and numbers from some alien language that ran across infinite darkness. When I tried to move my hand, the numbers changed. Voices, the voices of the Spirit Guides, chattered, sometimes speeding up or slowing down, even speaking backwards. Somehow I knew what they were talking about - it was my sins. My faults, my every irregularity, every nanosecond I deviated from destiny. And they were correcting it, poking and prodding me back into shape, uncaring that I was alive and awake and could feel every scalpel slice across my soul. I screamed. Over and over again, I begged Argelmach to awaken, to chase the celestial vivisectionists away like he chased off every other intruder.

Then I heard another voice. A voice speaking Orcish with a strange accent.

"Stop."

I blinked and looked down at my hands. I was in my body again, flesh and bone. The Spirit Guide was still there but it had moved away to face the newcomer - a human with thick, messy brown hair, dressed in brown robes and wolf furs. At her side were two beings that I recognised as corrupted elementals, although of what element I couldn't tell. They appeared to be made of stringy red lines of light that slithered like worms moving through treacle, their voices slow and disjointed.

"The Shattrath team needs reinforcements." she said, pointing to the wall. With a final emotionless whisper, the Spirit Guide floated back through the wall. The strange woman turned to look at me.

"Can't sleep?"

I nodded.

"Me neither." she said, "Haven't slept during Maintenance since I came to this world."

I gasped. "Are you...?"

"Its quite fun, once you get used to it." she continued, ignoring the question, "You can walk around the entire world and see nobody at all, even in the enemy capital. And the things you see... You can pretend you're a GM. I've always wanted to be a GM."

"How do you not go insane?"

"Oh, I'm already insane." she shrugged.

"You're... Doan Lagbringer, right?" I asked. She nodded. "The Master told me all about you. You can walk through walls like him."

"Walking through the wall is nothing. How would you like to fall through the world?"

"Er..." I stammered, looking down at Argelmach, "Can you help me? There was an explosion. If everything's not back to normal before he wakes up, he'll punish me."

"Oh, he'll have planned that to happen."

"What?" I wondered if she was truly insane. What kind of moron would put bombs in his own factory?

"Haven't you learned yet? Argelmach plans EVERYTHING to happen."

"But..."

"Do you want to know how I first met your Master?" she said, crouching on the floor, "I was travelling on the Zeppelin. I fell through the floor of the Zeppelin, straight through a mountain and into Ironforge. I thought the guards were going to kill me. Then Argelmach appeared, grabbed me and pulled me through the wall into Old Ironforge."

"I stayed there for a long time, until the next Maintenance when the guards were asleep. He told me something about himself." she continued, "Back when he was just a Dwarf, he suffered from serious insomnia. He didn't sleep through Maintenance. He almost went completely insane."

I considered this. Argelmach definitely wasn't insane. He was far too sane. That was what made him so terrifying.

"In desperation, he prayed to Ragnaros. His parents were priests, so he was taught always to pray to Ragnaros when he was in trouble." said the Lagbringer, "Ragnaros appeared to him and told him where Old Ironforge was, and how to get there. The Maintenance didn't like it there, so it didn't follow him. He stayed there for most of his young life."

"How did he make golems?"

"There's an old abandoned golem foundry in Old Ironforge." Doan explained, before standing up and looking around, a sad expression on her face, "There used to be many GMs here. Its so lonely now. So many GMs... I wish I was a GM..."

"Y..." I stammered, blushing, "You're not alone. The world will wake up tomorrow, and everyone'll still be there."

She smiled again and offered me a hand, "Would you like to walk with me a while? Across the world?"

"My Master... he'll kill me if I..."

"It's okay." she laughed, "By the time you get back, he'll be awake, so will all the golems and everything will be repaired."

"Promise?"

"I swear by the World Server." she saluted him.

"Er... Mrs. Lagbringer, ma'am?"

"Yes?"

"What are those elementals?"

"Oh, these?" she stretched and yawned, "These are corrupted latency elementals."

"What?"

"Elementals of pure latency." she said, "They absorb latency from their surroundings, and sometimes they leak, so it goes up and down. I think... at the moment... they're at... oh, yes, yes... Latency 6000."

THE END


	2. Chapter 2

"There was really no need for you to come here." said Argelmach, looking down at his beer with intense concentration, "There's nothing here worth your trouble. A weak tribe. Ought to be thrown in the furnace, if you ask me. Who kited you here anyway?"

"I ought to ask you the same question."

"Oh, I live here."

"So its true." the voice rumbled in his head like a dormant volcano about to awaken any second now, "You are not under my power."

The Dwarf looked decidedly more interested in his beer than in the mighty elemental lord, as if by dissecting it with the power of his mind he could somehow improve the flavour.

"I've been serving your interests, have I not?" he said.

"But you are not under my power." repeated Ragnaros, "And now I have you. Your real body."

"Oh, I wouldn't go that far."

"And what will you do to stop me? You have a powerful mind, I give you that, but you are mortal. You are weak."

"And you are here during Maintenance." said the Dwarf, "In the heart of Old Ironforge. Welcome to my world, Ragnaros."

Then, downing the pint, he looked up at the Firelord. His eyes were burning. Not with fire. They were seething with white noise, a maelstrom of monochrome.

--

"And here's where I first noticed the glitch in the water supply."

I followed her gaze. She knelt down next to a river in the middle of Stormwind. Except that the water wasn't there. Instead, there was a... gap in it. A big square gap, like a floorboard prized loose, revealing a gaping nothingness. A hole in space. I shivered. I wanted to go back. I wasn't used to this kind of thing. Many, many things were odd about my life - I realised that the life I led now was nothing like the life an ordinary person of my age should be living - but not like this weirdness. Was this a punishment? Something else orchestrated by him? An excuse to get me to stand like an idiot in the middle of Stormwind? And this Doan Lagbringer had seemed so nice...

A look of concern on her face, she stepped into the blackness. It was acting like ordinary water, lapping around her legs, maybe some thick black oil. I watched her, horrified. She merely smiled at me and offered me a hand. I shrugged and took it. It was usually better with these things not to try and resist.

With a sickening jolt, the world gave way under my feet. I plummeted down - through the soil, through the rock, down and out the other side until suddenly I was falling into a sky, an ocean of stars, watching the rocky underside of the world recede away from me.

And here was me thinking the world was round...

"Where is this?" I demanded. We had landed in a place unlike any other I had seen. The sky was all wrong. It was black, white and a few shades of grey inbetween. Even though the air was thick with a brewing storm, so close that I could feel the crackling in my hair, it just hung there, never quite reaching its potential. A little like me, I mused. I had never really trusted the sky. I didn't see it very often and that meant I didn't know what it was up to behind my back.

"I don't know." she admitted, looking around her, "I've never seen this place before."

"You jumped into a hole without knowing where you were going?"

"It doesn't usually lead here."

She sat down and crossed her legs, her eyes going blank. I was used to this by now - it was what shamans did when they meditated, contacted the elemental planes. Personally, from what I knew of elementals, they were best left well alone but I can't profess to being the world's premier elementalist. She was probably summoning the little cursor to send off on a scouting mission, I supposed, or her latency elementals to protect us. Latency was a kind of corrupted technology element, I had learned, not to be used frivolously.

Then she screamed, a feral, primal scream. I looked around for something to hide behind, on top of or inside, but there was only an endless misty plane. The monochrome mist rose to become the monochrome sky. That sky... it was crackling more furiously now... the storm coming closer...

Until, with one swift, jerky movement...

--

I looked around at the Humans, frozen in time like the enormous, ugly statues of famous genodical maniacs that they erected in their town square. Frozen in the act of whatever they were doing - eating, plying their wares, fixing the roof, prophesising the Apocalypse, falling over in a drunken stupor. Fascinated, I reached out a hand to touch one of them but Doan slapped it away.

"You'll make it worse for them and for yourself."

"What happened to them?"

"Disconnected."

"Isn't there anything we can do for them?"

"Not without using my powers, and this would be a very, very bad time to call upon a technology elemental." she said.

"Why is that?"

"One might answer."

"What do you..."

She indicated for me to be quiet and pointed to the sky. My face went slightly whiter than it normally does. The sky was the same colour as it had been in that other realm. Either we were still there and this wasn't Stormwind at all, or... I prayed to Ragnaros that we were still there.

Then, slowly, jerkily, inexorably, the old bell of the Cathedral tolled - once, twice, three times, eleven times in total.

Maintenance was over.

--

The eyes of Argelmach Mk. 29 flickered open.

He spluttered. He appeared to be covered in splinters and rock dust. Not only had his apprentice not wiped him down, he had tried to reactivate him against his will. Punishments played through his mind, considerably brightening his mood after the shock of awakening in such poor condition.

Picking himself up, he walked down the corridor in the opposite direction to the Manufactory. There were a few startled yells - Argelmach very rarely ventured outside his territory and wasn't really welcome, with his unkempt facial hair and disrespectful attitude towards his elemental lord. He also stole beer, but he wasn't sure if anyone actually realised this yet. After all, the bouncer was on his side.

Still, he did love the City. It was proud. It was vast. It was elegant yet functional. It was dark and brought fear to his enemies. Mr. Darkvire had done well to design such beautiful architecture. The man was almost as brilliant as Argelmach himself.

He made his way through Shadowforge City, waving at a few people to make them paranoid. After a while, he left the City and walked out of the Mountain altogether.

He looked up at the sky.

It was beginning.

A cruel smile played over his lips as he watched the figure descend from the mad maelstrom in the sky. It looked like any other elemental, except ten times the size and 256 shades of grey, shifting chaotically from black to white. Chains of crimson light hung around its gargantuan frame. That red light... it pulsed through the elemental like poison running through veins.

"Atropos." he said. With a roar like that of several sacks of rusty nails being flushed down a toilet, the elemental lord looked straight at him. He simply smiled.

"I see that young Lagbringer was successful." said Argelmach, "Welcome to the world, Atropos, Elemental Lord of Latency."


End file.
